Sunday, November 04, 2012

One piece of the PC MC jigsaw puzzle: Superimposing the Western religious model onto Islam in order to try to explain the problem of Muslims

One
phrase I have been fond of using over the years is of the “interlocking axioms
of the jigsaw puzzle of the PC MC paradigm”. I’d like to examine one of
those axioms, or pieces, of the puzzle in more detail today.

First,
I will take a slightly roundabout path to it, by considering a
particular, and very interesting, (though as we have seen from similar stories over the years, not uncommon) detail arising out of the car-bombing plots in the UK back in 2007.

In an article
on Jihad Watch on those plots over five years ago, it was reported that the father of one of the
recent suspected UK car bombers, the young doctor Mohammed Asha (held along with his wife as suspects in the aborted
terrorist plot), protested that his son was not the terrorist type.

“He
is a devout Muslim like the rest of us,” said Jamil Asha of his son,
“but he is not extremely religious. He didn't have time for religion
because he was always studying.”

Now,
what pivots our attention to the specific piece of the puzzle we are
analyzing today is the apt—but, as usual, incomplete—observation of
Robert Spencer in his remark about this:

How
interesting that Asha père equates the intensity of one’s Islamic
religious commitment with the possibility that he might become a jihad
terrorist. This is an equation that no Western public figure would dare
to make. Has Old Man Asha been hauled before the “Islamophobia” tribunal
yet?

Of course,
Spencer is quite correct about the ostensible, superficial aspect of the
father’s comment; and all we Jihad Watchers know the feeling all too
well of frustration and anger that so many around us in the West cannot
see this phenomenon becoming more and more obvious in the years after
911—to wit, that the more Islamic a Muslim is, the deadlier he may
become (with the inverse tending to be true also: the less Islamic, the
less deadly—though many of us Jihad Watchers are becoming more and more
skeptical of any gradation there at all, and many if not most of us are
tending toward the merciless binary option of all or nothing, non-Muslim
or Muslim, forced upon us by the venerable mirror image of that binary
option which Muslims have been forcing upon the world around them for
1,400 years).

But it would
be a mistake for Spencer and the rest of us Jihad Watchers to conclude
from this that our fellow Westerners, blind to such an obvious
phenomenon, are merely being stupid, or lazy, or willfully ignorant in
order to satisfy their greed, or part of a dastardly cabal that wishes
to suppress such obvious facts.

No,
I would maintain that such a blindness is not indicative of any
ophthalmological problem in the eyes of these PC MC people themselves.
Their eyes are working fine: it is the tunnel by which their vision is
being re-routed that is the problem. And that tunnel vision is governed
not by character flaws—how silly!—nor is it governed by evil—how
outrageously cynical! No: it is governed mostly by the PC MC paradigm that
has become sociopolitically dominant and mainstream throughout the
modern West over the past 50-odd years.

In
the particular example noted above of the Muslim father apparently
noticing the phenomenon that increased Islam might well correspond to an
increased likelihood of terrorist action, what Spencer misses is the
reason why this is not noticed by the PC MC mainstream, and how this is
misunderstood.

What is
going on here, I think—and here we come to the piece of the puzzle in
question—is that Westerners, at least those millions who have been
formed by the PC MC paradigm, superimpose upon Islam and upon Muslims a
peculiarly Western feature of religiousity that involves the ongoing
evolution of Judaeo-Christianity in the modern West—an evolution that
Islam has not gone through except insofar as the West has insinuated
and/or imposed its invasive influence upon the Muslim world increasingly
over the past 300 years or so. Over the past 300 years or so,
Judaeo-Christian religiousity has undergone profound changes,
dislocations, shocks and refinements.

Some
key particular features of the current state of
Judaeo-Christianity—and, closely intertwined with this, the current
state of Western understanding of its own Judaeo-Christianity—are that:

1) “extremism” is a relatively minority phenomenon;

2)
“extremism” is more or less equated with “fundamentalism”, and the
latter is more or less equated with trying to revive the roots of the
religion, or (in common parlance) trying to bring back the good old
days;

3) attempts at
revival of the roots of the religion are seen as types of a regression
away from a progressive evolution toward increasing secularization which
is at least tacitly acknowledged to have become the norm for modern
Western Judaeo-Christianity;

4)
current PC MC people even find it unremarkably reasonable to assume that
attempts at revival—even if they are really rooted in an accurate
version of the fundaments of the religion being revived—are for the most
part forms of “hijacking” the religion.

Note:

These
four points hold sway in the modern PC MC mind incoherently juxtaposed
with sometimes contradictory attitudes about so-called Christian “Fundamentalists” (along with an amorphous anti-Catholicism)—contradictory insofar as these latter attitudes
presuppose a normatively extremist Christianity still threatening, in
one way or another, the secular order (though the anti-Christian can
rarely adduce sufficient data to warrant his concern, and simultaneously
often ignores the sufficient data that can be presented regarding the
legitimate concern about present-day Islam). It is an unremarkable—but, alas, all too common—feature of PC MC that incoherent paradoxes are often part of the routine mental process of the person deformed by it.

Now,
here is the point: these four points do in fact pertain to the ongoing
evolution of modern Western Judaeo-Christianity—for, at best, it has
been undergoing a profound, amazing, yet disturbing and often
vicissitudinous transition, spanning centuries, of actually opening
itself up to change, enacting on a micro-civilizational scale the
wondrous paradox of Eternity and Eternal Truths becoming living organic
(and of course ever-imperfect) processes in time, in the living men and
women who carry those Truths from generation to generation, on an
adventure toward a mysterious future.

Of
course, there are complicating wrinkles to this, the most important
being that the same secularized modernity that has become increasingly
dominant over the past 300-odd years has also been hostile to its own
Judaeo-Christianity; and in a sense, this hostility has been increasing,
insofar as secularism formerly was dominated by Judaeo-Christianity,
then struggled against “the Church” (whether that is Catholicism or its
furcation into myriad Protestant expressions), and then finally rose to
dominance itself, relegating its own Judaeo-Christianity to a largely
sociopolitico-culturally marginal role.

A
sub-wrinkle to this has been the relatively recent paranoia on the part
of PC MC people about a supposedly increasing threat of “Christian
theocracy” in America and sometimes also in Western Europe (often, in
the minds of these paranoiacs, conjoined with some nebulously nefarious
Judaism). This sub-wrinkle would tend to contradict the logic of the
preceding adumbration that arises out of the same overarching
understanding produced by modern Western secularism about religion. That
contradiction is probably not resolvable, and can be chalked up to an
incoherence in logic that is unfortunately rather common in the PC
MC mindset, by which, in this case, they like to have their cake of the
progressive benefits of modern Enlightenment in society in general
including religion, while eating their ever-present fear of the evil
Reactionaries always lurking around the corner to undermine the ongoing
Revolution of Leftist Progress. And lest the reader think I am only
talking about modern Leftists and/or Atheists, I would hasten to note
that in my estimation there are millions of Western Christians (and
untold numbers of Western Jews) who also believe in not only
Enlightenment progress, but also, to one degree or another, in the
logical consequences that arise therefrom: of the neo-Gnostic and
anti-Western Revolution that has tended to attend it—with its latest
permutation being the mainstream dominance of Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism.

At
any rate, what people formed by PC MC tend to do is superimpose this
Western template about religiousity upon Islam and Muslims: whenever the
PC MC person sees a Muslim extremist, that PC MC person reflexively, and
axiomatically, assumes what he otherwise, and incoherently, will not be
equally generous to assume about the Christians and Jews he is so
anxious about: to wit, that the Muslim is not part of the mainstream but
is part of a small minority who are regressive (even if the fundaments
they wish to revive are admitted to pertain to the real core of Islam),
in much the same way that one would say that a snake-handling Southern
Baptist from a church in the swampland of the Deep South is more
extremist and fundamentalist than the polished and generally
liberal-minded Christians of the mainstream Methodist, Presbyterian,
Congregationalist, Lutheran, Episcopalian churches, whose members are
practically as PC and secularized as the PC MC secularist. Similarly, most
people in the West regard the heightened religiousity of the sectarians
(Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Amish, etc.) or cultists (the “Moonies”,
the followers of David Koresh, etc.) as indicative of extremism and
fundamentalism.

In
effect—and this is the strangest thing about this wrinkle and its
sub-wrinkle—the PC MC secularist has transposed this rather generous
definition of extremism, as a pathology not pertaining to the main body
of the religion, away from his own Western religions (mainly Judaeo-Christian) and onto Islam.I.e., the PC MC secularist now tends to be more inclined
to view Christianity generally as being extremist (unless the
Christians are aggressively Leftist and/or African-American, like a
Jesse Jackson), while at the same time being less inclined to
apply the same standard to Islam and Muslims. When I say “now tends to”,
I do not mean to imply that this is a very recent phenomenon. No, it
seems to have been a part of PC MC for as long as PC MC has been dominant; and
even before PC MC was dominant, I noticed in the “proto-PC MC” scholar T.W.
Arnold of 1917, whom I analyzed in a previous essay,
a similar tendency to regard the Western “clerics” of his day with
distaste and suspicion while seeming to bend over backwards to look
favorably upon the Islamic clerics of 19th and early 20th century India
(his field of expertise)—who he even admitted were more “Puritanical”
than their Western counterparts!

In
sum, we may observe wryly that, with all these wrinkles and
sub-wrinkles, Western modernity is no longer the juvenile upstart it was
in history, but is now showing its age. With the problem of an Islam
Redivivus on the horizon and at our doorsteps, this secularist age—the
Age of Political Correctness coming of age as a Man-Child who's had work
done—is not a pretty sight, nor is it a sign of maturity, but of a
doddering—and increasingly reckless—saeculum senescens.